As Certinia unveiled its impressive Spring ’25 release, DJ Paoni, CEO, also gave a business update on the company’s performance. This was good news for the investors Haveli Investments and the recently joined TA Associates.
Certinia’s financial year runs to January 31st. Paoni commented, “Since we are privately held, we don’t disclose comprehensive growth figures publicly. But what I can share is that Certinia had a very successful fiscal year in 2025.
“We achieved our first-ever annual profit on an EBITDA basis. We also saw healthy customer retention at a 109% net retention rate and reached over one million monthly active users for the first time. Our customers created over 6 million projects using our solutions last year. We also achieved our highest NPS score of 40.”
Certinia also continued to evolve during 2025 from the Financial management-focused company that was once named FinancialForce. It has renamed the product it first launched with to Financial Management Cloud and launched Customer Success Cloud last year.
It now offers an end-to-end solution with Salesforce for professional services organisations, both embedded and businesses.
Customer Success Cloud took some time to emerge to general availability, but the beta customer list was impressive, with Cisco, Dell and Salesforce all using the new product. Enterprise Times asked Paoni what momentum they have seen with the product now generally available.
He answered, “We’re seeing good momentum with Customer Success (CS) Cloud following its general availability launch last year. We’ve had important validation from customers like Salesforce, Phillips, and Diabsolut, who are live and seeing value. We anticipate FY26 will be a strong growth year for CS Cloud. We see CS Cloud, working together with our market-leading Professional Services (PS) Cloud, as key to defining the future of services delivery.”
The strong partnership with Salesforce helps Certinia
Salesforce was one of the first investors in FinancialForce/Certinia and has retained an investment. If it becomes successful enough, Salesforce may buy Certinia, giving it a complete solution for services businesses and its first financial management suite, which could be extended to other businesses over time.
The relationship is still strong, with Certinia becoming one of the first Salesforce ISVs to join the Agent Force partner network. It means that Certinia will be one of the first to market with Salesforce-powered Agentic AI solutions. Expect to see more later this year, especially at Dreamforce 25. The firm was also an early developer of Gen AI agents and has now developed at least 44 of them to help customers automate processes.
What is relevant are the relationships that Salesforce have with enterprises, many of which have embedded professional services organisations. With the growing importance of Customer Success within businesses, Salesforce and Certinia can provide an end-to-end solution for those business units. The firm could see great success in the enterprise space for this application, coupled with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Certinia Professional Services Cloud.
Other partnerships are important too
Paoni also sees the importance of the partner ecosystem, commenting, “We’ve got meaningful room to grow through our partner ecosystem. We have a very strong leader that’s leading our third party ecosystem.
“We’ve made some great enhancements that we shared recently, just providing partners with a greater level of clarity and understanding of where they fit into Certinia’s strategy and really just making it easier to work with us, making it easier to do business with us.”
Enterprise Times asked Certinia what types of partners it is now looking to work with. Greg O’Sullivan, VP of Global Partner Alliances & Channels, commented, “We see significant opportunities for growth through our partner ecosystem and recently shared our strategy for partners to make it easier to work with us.
“A key focus is our innovation partnership with Salesforce; we were one of the first ISVs to join the Agentforce Partner Network and are continuing to build on that relationship to advance AI capabilities.
“Supporting our joint go-to-market with Salesforce, we also work with a growing community of Services Partners who have deep Salesforce-related expertise and services industry domain knowledge, implementing Certinia solutions for our end customers. Beyond that, we don’t publicly detail specific target partner profiles by size, industry, or region.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Is 2025 going to be the breakthrough year for Certinia? Over its history, it has promised much but never quite achieved the hyper-growth and profitability that its solutions were capable of. The firm now has a better focus on its target market and with Customer Success Cloud.
This solution is differentiated from the market leaders because of its PSA solution and integration with Salesforce. The sales cycle for the solution is likely to be long, though, and it would be interesting to know the pipeline details.
It was disappointing that Certinia did not share growth figures. But if the firm manages to sign up and roll out Customer Success Cloud to a few named enterprise customers, that will prove the upwards momentum is real.
On the product front, it will also be an exciting year with more Gen AI agents and the first Agentic AI agents due out in the Summer ’25 release. On the partner front, can Certinia sign up more global SIs to further accelerate growth?
